Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary and precarious civilization becomes more serious. Fascism abroad grows more bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures, more tyrannical toward its own citizens, more barbarian in its contempt for the life of the mind. Even in our own country we have reason to fear a tendency toward militarization and the curtailment of civil liberty.

Preface (p. 3)
The Earth; The Starting Point

The Earth; The Starting Point
Preface (p. 3)

No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.

The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.